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the racial conversation in the United States, circa 2018: that white America speaks of race as a consideration to be transcended, and black America speaks of race as a force to be acknowledged; that white America believes that the purpose of talking about race is to one day end the conversation, and black America believes that the purpose of talking about race is to one day get the real conversation started.

Mike Tomlin is a black man who is also a coach. Does that make him a black coach, or has he transcended categorization and earned the right to be thought of as a coach, period? After all, he is not only one of the most successful African-American coaches in the history of the NFL but also the only coach since Curly Lambeau not to finish a season under .500 in any of his first 11 seasons. And yet, if he deserves to be thought of as “more than a black coach,” he also deserves to be thought of as nothing less than a black coach, a coach whose importance lies not in the fixed and monumental face he shows the world but rather in the heart he shows his players.

It is, you see, an African-American heart, which is to say a father’s heart, armored and exposed and aching. He is not just a father to his players; he often seeks and finds players who have lost their fathers or who are trying to man up and be fathers themselves. The man with a ministry is also a coach with a mission, the difference being that the coach’s mission includes sending young men into the front lines of something very much like battle. It is well-known that Shazier was and is one of Coach T’s favorites, a player he loves like a son. “I was there the week before Ryan got hurt,” Dungy says. “It was very clear, the relationship that they had, the depth of that relationship.”

It is also well-established within the Steelers’ compound that Coach T is working hard to teach safer tackling techniques, repeating “Don’t hit the head, don’t use the head” so many times that it’s become one of his maxims. But as every father learns, neither love nor tutelage is any guarantee of protection, and Shazier used his head against the Bengals, ending up with an injury that changed the course not just of his career but also of his life. Tomlin couldn’t even stay on the field as the medical staff attended to him, because that was Colbert’s job—or, as Colbert says, “My job at that point was to keep Coach informed, and his job at that point was to understand but to try to win the game.”

He won the game even as the game became infamous, because that’s what he does. He is not just a black coach and not just a players’ coach; he is first and foremost a football coach, so his story is one of moral advantage, unflaggingly accrued but then devastatingly applied. It is one thing to inspire players with the language of common sacrifice; it is quite another to see them commonly sacrificed, week after week and year after year. But that is Tomlin’s job, which he does with eyes shadowed and heart on one of the yellow sleeves of the Steelers varsity jacket he wears on the sideline. Along with Dungy, he is one of the two most successful African-American head coaches in the history of football, but he is also a black man who bears the ancient and excruciating obligation of speaking to his sons as if they were warriors and speaking to warriors as if they were his sons.

“I’M A WORKER and not a talker,” he tells me when I encounter him at the Pro Bowl.

In fact, he works by talking and talks incessantly. He is a chatterbox, even during games, especially during games. That’s how he competes. When the Steelers played New England in December—and Tomlin squared off against Bill Belichick—he spent the entire game roaming the sideline in bright white sneakers, engaging his players in conversation. He talked to them individually, and he talked to them in units. He talked to them when they came off the field, and he talked to them before they went back into the game. He talked to them when they talked to him. He talked to his quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, and he talked to his defensive captain, Cameron Heyward, and he talked to Martavis Bryant and Le’ Veon Bell. He talked to L.T. Walton and Vince Williams and Stephon Tuitt, and he talked to Mike Hilton and William Gay. He talked to Tyson Alualu and Brian Allen, and he talked to Mike Mitchell and Sean Spence and Artie Burns, and he talked several times, and with high passion, to Sean Davis, who had to cover Rob Gronkowski and got eaten alive.

And what did he say? “Stay together,” says Heyward, a defensive end whom Tomlin has asked, explicitly, to lead and to “be the heart and soul” of the Steelers’ defense. “No matter how crazy the situation gets or how pissed off you get, stay together. Coach T doesn’t talk just to talk. What he says is very meaningful and straightforward. You have to appreciate that during a game. It’s not always going to be nice. But he’s challenging us to get better, and we can challenge each other.”

And then they lost.

They lost because the refs applied the fractal geometry of the NFL’s catch rule to a Pittsburgh touchdown and somehow proved that it never happened. But they also lost because Tomlin didn’t have any timeouts to stop the clock before the last play of the game. They lost because he forced Roethlisberger to improvise, and Roethlisberger meatballed a pass to a New England defensive back.

And then three weeks later he lost again, in the Steelers’ first game of the playoffs, against Jacksonville. He lost because his Steelers were overwhelmed at the outset, and because when they finally came within seven points of a tie, Tomlin called an onside kick that, with 2 minutes and 18 seconds left to play, effectively ended a game that should have been contested to the last tick of the clock.

He had spent the season out of character. Or, more precisely, he had spent the season more and more in character, with the mask he has worn for so long— that fierce and wary expression of pure will—coming slightly dislodged. As his friend and former player Ryan Clark of ESPN says: “You get tired of working hard not to be you.” Maybe Tomlin got tired; or maybe he finally felt comfortable enough to start showing his personality. Before the New England game, he gave an interview to Dungy in which he let down his guard altogether and stated forthrightly that even if the Steelers lost, they’d be playing the Patriots again, in the AFC championship game. “Most coaches wouldn’t say that, even if they believed it,” Dungy says. “But Mike said what he believed.”

When the 13–3 Steelers lost again in the playoffs, there would be no rematch with the Patriots. There would be no inevitable AFC championship game, and suddenly things were what they never are in Pittsburgh: different. Tomlin came under attack from newspaper columnists, television commentators and even a consortium of owners with a minority stake in the team, not merely for tactical errors he’d made at crucial moments of crucial games but for being himself and then for not being himself. He was slapped for doing what he had been slapped for not doing—for talking too much after a career of not talking enough, and for not only allowing his players to talk but also for being foolish enough to encourage them. There were stories of James Harrison falling asleep in meetings before he was cut, and offensive coordinator Todd Haley getting in a bar fight before he was let go, and Le’Veon Bell coming late for workouts before asking for $15 million a year, and suddenly one of the most controlled and controlling human beings on earth found himself characterized as an enabler of chaos.

It was not a failure of leadership, and in the end Art Rooney II is not going to fire a leader of men. But it was a failure of the unified field Tomlin has tried to create, because he stood for different things to different people in different situations. The face of Steelers tradition was now the face of the Steelers’ tradition of underachieving in the playoffs, and the face of the most successful black coach in the NFL was now the face of a players’ coach who lost control of his players. Tomlin had tried to change with the times, explaining the latitude he offered his players on social media and in locker room interviews as